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While microservice architectures offer lots of great benefits, there’s also a downside. Perhaps most notably, there is an increased complexity in monitoring the overall reliability and performance of the system. In addition, when problems are identified, finding a root cause can be a challenge. To ease these pains in managing the IBM Bluemix UI (made up of more than twenty microservices running on CloudFoundry), we’ve built a lightweight system using Node.js and other opensource tools to capture key metrics for all microservices (such as memory usage, CPU usage, speed and response codes for all inbound/outbound requests, etc.). In this approach, each microservice publishes lightweight messages (using MQTT) for all measurable events while a separate monitoring microservice subscribes to these messages. When the monitoring microservice receives a message, it stores the data in a time series DB (InfluxDB) and sends notifications if thresholds are violated. Once the data is stored, it can be visualized in Grafana to identify trends and bottlenecks. Tony Erwin will discuss the details of the Node.js implementation, real-world examples of how this system has been used to keep the Bluemix UI running smoothly without spending a lot of money, and how it’s acted as a “canary” to find problems in non-UI subsystems before the relevant teams even knew there was an issue!

Tony Erwin is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM and currently the Lead Architect for the IBM Bluemix UI. He's been with IBM for 18 years and has extensive full-stack experience building UIs using a wide variety of technologies. Current interests include cloud, Node.js, microservi... Read More →